Discussed in this essay: Chester B. Himes: A Biography, by Lawrence P. Jackson. W. W. Norton. 640 pages. $35. Early in Chester Himes’s first and best-known novel, If He Hollers…

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Circulation Journal published the editorial “Tolvaptan, Is It a Trump to Worsening Renal Function?” Neurosurgeons published “A Political Case of Penetrating Cranial Trauma,” Senegalese doctors compiled reports of people who…

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One morning, as I walked on the quiet, mostly wooded King Mountain trail above San Francisco Bay, a dog not much smaller than I and possessed of much sharper teeth…

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In Name Only As Robert O. Paxton notes, it’s tempting to label President Trump a fascist [“American Duce,” Revision, May]. Just look at Trump’s far-right entourage—Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller…

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Estimated payload, in pounds of military-grade explosives, of fireworks purchased annually in the United States :  5,900,000 Of the MOAB, the U.S. military’s most powerful non-nuclear bomb :  18,000 Amount…

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By Ellen Ullman, from Life in Code, which will be published next month by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ullman is a former computer programmer and the…

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From tasks performed in Walden, a computer game in which players simulate the life of Henry David Thoreau. The game was developed by Tracy Fullerton at the University of Southern…

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From letters that Marcel Proust wrote to his neighbors Marie and Charles Williams between 1908 and 1916, while he lived at 102 Boulevard Haussmann, in Paris. Charles Williams owned a…

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From voice messages sent on WhatsApp by Abdul Aziz Muhamat, a twenty-four-year-old Sudanese refugee detained on Manus Island, to Michael Green, a journalist, in March and April 2016. That April,…

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From a guide to “common principles of behavior” recommended to Russian tourists visiting foreign countries. The guide was released by the Russian Foreign Ministry in March. Translated from the Russian…

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From minutes at a county council meeting in Kauai, Hawaii, in 2015. Residents gave public testimony regarding the repeal of an ordinance that imposed fines on the owners of barking…

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By Catherine Lacey, from Certain American States, a forthcoming collection of short stories. Lacey’s second novel, The Answers, was published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She is a…

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From a list of features advertised for I Just Made Love! The cell phone app consists of a user-generated map and social network.  Use your built-in GPS to mark the…

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By Oli Hazzard, from a manuscript in progress. Hazzard has published two volumes of poetry, including, most recently, Within Habit (2014).  calling in sick      for each other in each other’s…

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The coming crackdown

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On coming to America I had the same hopes as have most European immigrants and the same disillusionment, though the latter affected me more keenly and more deeply. The immigrant without…

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The Democrats struggle to rise from the ashes

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An ethnic-cleansing campaign by the government threatens to empty South Sudan

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Lessons from the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913

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How Cubans deliver culture without internet

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The disgraced broadcaster’s distortions of history

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ocial historians will record that in the early twenty-first century the fashion for a clean-shaven face lost its dominance in metropolitan North American bourgeois society. (The no-nonsense goatee-mustache, associated with…

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In Marie ­NDiaye’s novel MY HEART HEMMED IN (Two Lines Press, $14.95), Nadia and Ange, a middle-aged couple from Bordeaux, become outcasts. “What sort of wickedness, I ask myself, are they suddenly…

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